A caricature style of drawing the human male figure as having a huge torso and arms, but legs that appear too skinny and/or too short to support the upper body. This trope is an exaggeration of male bodybuilders (or any reasonably toned man with low body fat) having the ideal "triangle" figure of a broad chest and shoulders with a narrow waist. The drawn form of this can range from a moderately large torso and legs that are just a bit too skinny, to legs that are short and stubby and the torso is freakishly huge to keep the guy still at normal height.

This still requires legs being proportionately small compared to the torso, not simply a guy with a big, muscular chest and/or arms. Real Life humans are unlikely to be Top Heavy Guys; though some animals such as penguins as well as bears and some apes when they stand on their hind legs would count as real-life examples.

Examples:

open/close all folders

Anime & Manga

Franky in One Piece was a prominent example before the timeskip. Afterwards, it became absolutely preposterous.◊ Why he looks like that is justified in that he's a cyborg who built himself; how he can stand is left to the imagination. Bartholomew Kuma is another prominent example. While normally Lean and Mean, Rob Lucci's leopard Zoan fruit gives him a hybrid form with a profile similar to Kuma. In general this is Oda's art style for musclebound characters, especially prominent for anyone Hulking Out.

Soul Eater has Mosquito, while normally a puny old guy, has the ability to bulk himself up to fight. However, his legs do not increase in size, leaving them to dangle while he supports himself by his arms. This is lampshaded, as the first people to see it found it quite disgusting. But when he starts rolling back the clock on his age, then his body starts to look more proportionate.

Elfman of Fairy Tail post-Time Skip. His arm muscles have grown so huge that they dwarf the rest of his body.

Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo has some pretty long legs, but they're ridiculously slim for such a muscular guy, and there's seemingly not enough room in the area they come together in to actually fit a groin. It's the least odd thing about his appearance, really, considering the seventies attire, blond afro, and grill-mark tattoos lining his arms.

Comic Books

Strong Guy from Marvel Comics has a massive torso but regular legs. It isn't stylistic, his body was deformed by his powers overloading.

Tom Strong acquired this physique in adulthood, having been much leaner as a boy. Several characters compare him to an upside-down triangle ("You wonderful, triangular man!") — which, incidentally, is also his Chest Insignia. Evidently, it's a result of his upbringing in a high-gravity environment, coupled with the emphasis on the miracle food goloka in his diet. Tom Stone, an alternate version of Tom who wasn't raised in high gravity, is just a regular muscular guy.

Groo the Wanderer has massive, if slightly flabby, arms and torso... and skinny little rubber-hose legs that don't look like they should be able to support the top half of his body, being the same diameter from ankle to thigh.

Films — Animation

Max from Cats Don't Dance is enormous and very strong, and his legs are really small. Most of his body is his torso.

Rattigan from The Great Mouse Detective has this build. Being a... um... big mouse RAT!!! he has very broad shoulders, a wide chest, and overall is extremely muscular in the upper body. However, he has a teeny tiny waist and very short legs, easily fitting into a triangle shape. His head is also quite small compared to his shoulder width, despite his genius IQ.

Beauty and the Beast: The titular Beast is a downplayed example, with broad shoulders and long, but toned, legs. More noticeable in Kingdom Hearts due to being less hidden by his cape.

In the Hellboy Animated movies, Hellboy is drawn with a huge upper body but mere human-sized legs.

Chanticleer the rooster from Rock-A-Doodle. Justified since such proportions are normal for a rooster.

Wreck-It Ralph is a bit more brick-shaped◊ than conventionally triangular, but he definitely has far, far more upper body and arm mass than his short, stumpy legs should be able to support. His hands have more physical mass than his legs. Justified by both his nature as a video-game character designed in the '80s 8-bit era, and being a physical Expy of Donkey Kong in particular. He does not revert to the expected Primal Stance his physique would imply, due to being more intelligent than he appears.

From The Incredibles, Mr. Incredible has puny legs, whether his torso is flabby or muscular.

As quoted above, Kronk from The Emperor's New Groove has legs that are long, but are only slightly larger than broom handles.

Mitch from ParaNorman. His legs are noticeably smaller and shorter than his muscular arms. Despite this he can punt a zombie head 100 yards.

As part of the distinctive art style of The Book of Life, several male characters' Heroic Builds are exaggerated to this, giving them enormous, muscular shoulders and tiny skinny legs.

Humorously inverted in The Triplets of Belleville. Having cycled for most of his life, Champion has a rail-thin torso with overly developed legs.

Kai from Kung Fu Panda 3 has absolutely tiny legs, making up less than about 25% of his total height and his extremely bow-legged stance makes them look even shorter. Po actually has pretty short legs as well, though not nearly to the same extreme.

Jokes

There's a joke about employees of a clothing store assuming that a person who is buying a shirt for one man and a pair of pants for another is actually buying a complete outfit for one guy who fits this trope.

Carrot Ironfoundersson from Guards! Guards! is described as getting his name for his built, rather than his red hair.

Played straight (huge torso and stubby legs) and inverted (incredibly skinny torso and massive legs) in the beach scene in Where's Waldo?.

Played for squick in Sabriel. Kerrigor first appears inhabiting a magically created construct body he's tried to model to resemble his living appearance — emphasis on tried. Apparently, 200+ years of undeath leaves one's memories of what being human is like rather foggy, and the construct resembles a twisted parody of a man more than anything, complete with having a grotesquely over-sized chest matched with spindly limbs. As Mogget points out, it's not a body that a vain man like Kerrigor would really want people to see.

Live-Action TV

SNL once did a skit depicting a show called "How Much Ya Bench?", with Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, David Spade, Jay Mohr, and guest host Emilio Estevez as bodybuilders — who were totally not on steroids — with tiny stick legs.

An episode of Are You Being Served? implied this about an unseen man when a set of his pajamas are found to consist of a huge shirt and a tiny pair of pants.

Music

"Particle Man" by They Might Be Giants has been subject to a wide array of interpretations over the years, but Word of God suggests that it was partly based on this trope:

John Linnell: Triangle Man was based on a friend's observation that Robert Mitchum looked like an evil triangle when he took his shirt off in Night of the Hunter. Nothing else not explicitly stated need be inferred.

Tabletop Games

Kings of War ogres have over-muscled upper bodies and small legs. Trolls take those proportions up to eleven.

Bullymongs are large gorilla-like creatures with four massive, muscular arms and a torso that tapers into a very small set of legs; their thighs are about the size of any one of their fingers.

The Tank from Left 4 Dead has a massive upper body, supported by fairly normal-sized legs. Its bulk is so great its lower jaw has either been forced off, or crushed, by massive pectoral muscles; it actually walks like a gorilla, using its massive arms to help support itself.

Muggshot from the Sly Cooper games has such an atrophied lower body that his legs don't reach the floor◊. He walks on his knuckles, and therefore has to stand still to shoot.

Though averted as far as graphical representation of the hero goes, Quest for Glory IV lampshades the trope in an instruction manual emphasizing the need for proper legwork with cautionary tales about top-heavy would-be-heroes. Naturally, it's also the first time any game allowed the hero to do any sort of exercise with his legs.

Blasto, a third-person action platformer for the original Playstation, had a protagonist whose upper torso to lower body proportions can only be described as preposterous even by top heavy standards, with a hugely exaggerated chest, shoulders, and biceps, but comically tiny hands and legs...and that chin. Even with his stance braced for balance, you get the feeling he's going to tip over any second now.◊

Cranking the "Weight" slider to max in the first two Rock Band games will turn a male character into this.

Darkrai from Pokémon normally has a triangular torso and a thin, spindle-like waist, with a pair of clawed arms but no legs, but when Darkrai actually does show its legs, they're actually very thin and bony.

The GameCube RPGs have the Bodybuilder trainer class, as well as Duking, Battlus/Somek, and Agnol (who are all based on Bodybuilders).

Timburr, Gurdurr and Conkeldurr from Black and White have huge muscular arms and torsos, but tiny legs. Especially Conkeldurr.

Minotaurs in Dragon Nest have this appearance. They drop an item called Joint Treatment that lampshades it. After all, their poor tiny knees have to support gargantuan tops.

Inspector Grosky of the Professor Layton series has a huge chest. His pecs are so big, the collar of his shirt is actually down near nipple level, tie and all, with his prodigious bush of chest hair poking out.

As of Sonic Boom, Knuckles also qualifies. He has a reason for this; he doesn't like legs day.

The bigger characters in general such as Vector The Crocodile, Storm The Albatross and Bark The Polar Bear tend to have big, routound upper bodies and stubby legs.

Of course, who can forget Eggman with his rather round belly and pencil-thin legs? Some designs give him fatter legs, though those designs tend to play this trope even MORE straight by making his legs significantly shorter compared to his arms and torso.

This is what your character becomes in the browser game The Douchebag Life when you bulk him up.

Skullgirls has Samson's independent form, detached from his host, Filia. Filia is also a downplayed, female version; she has a very heavy midsection (chubby abdomen, large breasts, big thighs, and muscly forearms) but has legs so spindly its a miracle they can support her in the first place. What makes it stranger is that they fight as a team, and most of their strongest attacks are kicks.

Craig Marduk in Tekken is built this way (even moreso starting with Tekken 5). Tekken 7 newcomer Gigas also has this appearance (in addition to being Ambiguously Human in the first place). The various Jack robots throughout the series are a downplayed version: they don't actually have small legs, but they have huge arms and shoulders.

About half of the male cast of Shovel Knight are this. Notable major examples include Shovel Knight himself, Black Knight, King Knight, Polar Knight, and Treasure Knight.

Persona 4 has the very effeminate Shadow Kanji. The strange thing is, Shadow Kanji has two bodies (sort of); Shadow Kanji's first body resides in a top heavy black and white body while resting in a bouquet of roses.

This is the effect one gets out of Greater Dog in Undertale due to its very large upper body carried around on stumpy legs. The tiny dog face helps complete the look. Turns out it's a normal-sized dog in a sort of mechanized suit of armor, so the actual dog is not that top-heavy at all.

Scrapland has the police, who all have very large chests supported by tiny legs.

Web Comics

Buttlord GT's Mr. Huge, a Vegeta Expy, has the power to grow his torso and arms to gigantic proportions, while retaining a regular-sized head and legs.

Steve Barkin, Brick Flagg, Pain King and Steel Toe, Dementor's minions (Dementor himself has short legs, but is more boxy), and Drakken to a lesser extent (almost normal-proportioned, but still with shorter-than-average legs, although this is best seen when he's not in his usual lab coat; re: "Dimension Twist" and "Rappin' Drakken"). In fact, any male character who's not rail-thin (like Ron) is almost guaranteed to have short legs.

Gizmoduck's form also invokes this with the tiny unicycle wheel. Fenton himself, however, has a body type more like normal ducks in the series'.

Taurus Bulba takes this ludicrous extremes, wherein his lower body, legs and feet are so small as to be almost nonexistent, whilst his upper body is like that of a champion body builder. A pretty standard build for cartoon bulls, all things considered.

Vlad of the Danny Phantom series, most noticeable in his ghost form less so as a human. Dash and Kwan as well.

Iron Will, the minotaur from the episode "Putting Your Hoof Down", is built like this.

Bulk Biceps (the Memetic Bystander heavily muscled white pegasus most known for his "YEAH!" face) is a quadruped version of this trope, with an enormous head, neck, and torso tapering down to shins and hooves demonstrably smaller◊ than most of the cast, and even smaller than some of the foals◊. His occasional bipedal moments◊ reveal that he's just as ludicrously proportioned in that stance too. His human counterpart from My Little Pony: Equestria Girls averts it, though, his torso being muscular but his legs more correctly proportioned. Ironic given the opposite effect in the standard bodies.

In 3-2-1 Penguins!, Zidgel's and Midgel's upper bodies are longer than their legs. Justified in that they are penguins.

A Kind of Magic leans into Exaggerated Trope with Gregore the Ogre. He has a very massive upper body and ridiculously tiny legs, that barely encompass 1/6th of his full body height. A one-episode Prince Charmless has a similar build (he does mention that there are some ogres in his family tree).

Community

Tropes HQ

TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy